Dig it

Back in the 1960s it was far easier to meet pop stars than hear them on the radio, in my experience at least. I took this photograph on the afternoon I ran into Sonny and Cher at the Tower of London. They posed for me, had a chat about music, took me back to the Roller for autographs and eventually let me return to my parents and a crowd of slack jawed onlookers.

A mere two weeks later and another chance encounter in the lift of a Carlisle hotel. Just months ago apropos of nothing, my mother said “do you remember that time we met Jimi Hendrix in a lift?” As if there was the remotest possibility of forgetting the sixty seconds you shared a square metre space with the most legendary guitarist and rock showman of all time. And I’ll not even start about The Rolling Stones. Looking back on it, I suppose I was a kind of junior Forrest Gump in the swinging sixties: always there at critical moments, but not necessarily fully aware of what was going on.

Britain may well have swung like a pendulum do, but it was still phenomenally hard work to actually hear pop music back then. It was a bit like coal mining. In fact, in my case it actually involved spades and heavy digging. First, until 1967 you couldn’t just turn on the radio and listen to it. Well, you could, but not easily or well. The only way of hearing pop music was to tune to Radio Luxembourg or one of the pirate stations, which meant that it would be crackly, hissy and often just disappear at musically critical moments. The seemingly mystical ‘atmospherics’ meant that you were continually moving your radio around the room to capture the shifting tides and eddies of radio waves. Sometimes this involved standing on a chair holding the radio out of the window, which — to be honest — took the shine off one’s listening enjoyment.

It goes without saying that the further you were from Luxembourg, the more crackly and hissy it was. In Scotland you could barely hear it at all, which is why the Scots invented Lonnie Donegan. The other way of listening was to go to a record store, sit in a listening booth and ask the assistant to spin a few discs. Of course the expectation is that you bought one eventually, and my pocket money only ran to about three singles per year.

So every Friday and Saturday evening around ten of us would circulate around each others’ houses with our slender record collections in our hands, and basically DJ to each other. This enabled us to hear all the B sides that the radio never played. So, we’d all start off in Charlie’s bedroom, hear his new records, play a couple of our own, then when his parents got sick of the din, we’d decant to Andy’s, do the same there, and basically carry on around the neighbourhood till bed time. It was very much a social network — without the internet, without sponsored advertising and without all those fucking irritating selfies.

Then, around the age of fourteen, I discovered pop music as buried treasure. The older brother of a pal at school heard that a record pressing plant in North London dumped all of its seconds at a refuse site a twenty minute bus ride away from where we lived. This wasn’t just any record plant — this was the plant that did the crucial independent labels of Island, Trojan and Chrysalis.

So Sundays were generally spent digging through layers of rotten food and nappies until we hit a rich seam of vinyl. Some had no covers, or mis-printed covers. A few had the hole in the wrong place (and frankly anywhere not dead in the centre of the disc sounded very very spectacularly wrong). One or two had Side A from one album and Side B from a completely different album. Some had erroneous labels, and to this day the album in my loft that claims to be by Fairport Convention I have never been able to identify. But whether or not you knew who you were actually listening to, most of the vinyl that we mined was eminently playable. Now, there was an entrepreneurial side to all this. In many cases you’d unearth boxes containing a batch of the same record. Given that there are only so many copies of Blodwyn Pig’s debut album that even the keenest record collector needs, then those surplus to need could be traded at school on the Monday. And so it was that the Park Street Dump provided for me what illegal file sharing sites offer today. It also provided a modest cash income and some exercise at the same time: a nigh on perfect arrangement, if you didn’t mind smelling of fish and excrement for a couple of days.

The absence of sleeves in many cases led me to fashion my own out of card, and apply my own designs to them. My unique version of King Crimson’s In the Wake of Poseidon, was one I was particularly proud of. One thing led to another and a few years later I was appointed Professor of Design. So all those days smelling of shitty rotten mackerel paid off in the end.

Park Street Dump was later bulldozed to make way for the M25. Somewhere under the hard shoulder, just south of St Albans are a couple of boxes of the original pressing of Monkey Spanner by Dave and Ansell Collins and a quantity of In the Court of the Crimson King with slightly squint gatefold sleeves. Now that, my friend, is real buried treasure.